(UPDATED) The otherwise highly astute Khoi Vinh risks his reputation by shitcanning a beloved and unique iPad application, Mixel, that he was too (uncharacteristically) stupid to have charged for in the first place. And not only is Facebook not riding in on a navy-blue stallion to save the day, Mixel users will simply be barred from using the app in a matter of weeks. In fact, by the end of this week you won’t even be able to download the app, and soon this iPad app will begin to malfunction and never stop.

This is no way to remix a railroad. I call for a user uprising. [continue with: Khoi Vinh: We were too stupid to charge for Mixel, and, unlike Instagram, nobody bought us out →]

A blind person can use anything Apple makes that remotely resembles a computer – save for the iPod Classic – immediately and without help from a sighted person. (In some cases, it is somewhat easier to get a sighted person to turn on accessibility, as with a new iPod Nano.) A few other disabilities are almost as well accommodated; a few more are accommodated with effort. But it’s all standard equipment. Not only does everyone just expect it to work, on balance it actually does just work.

A couple of Android devices, running the rarely-seen current version of the operating system, kind of support accessibility. How well? About as well as you’d expect. [continue with: This is how lousy Android accessibility is →]

Has the Globe and Mail’s publishing reporter been hanging out with John Degen – that arts professional who believes copyright is a mechanism for payment, that stalwart defender of copyright (or at least of Access Copyright)? I got that impression from a factual error in John Barber’s scare piece about the future of freelance (“professional”) writers.

Barber ominously referred to “a recent Supreme Court decision that extended the rights of educators to photocopy books without compensating writers.” Alberta v. CCLA did no such thing. It merely held that teachers’ duplication of “short excerpts of [a] textbook” constituted fair dealing when considered with all the other factors that must be considered when determining fair dealing. The fact that only short excerpts were being duplicated was not in dispute at any point in the case.

Hence there is in fact no existing right for “educators to photocopy books without compensating writers.” And “educators” would never have been paying (“compensating”) anybody in the first place (i.e., paying a vig directly to a writer for copying their work).

I will note that Barber’s article appeared in a newspaper we spent 16 years in court fighting after it and its former parent company, Thomson, violated freelance writers’ copyrights. The future of freelance writers has been glum since the early 1990s when conglomerates like Thomson began to extort copyrights from freelance writers. What exactly are the terms of the Globe’s contracts with freelance writers (now and over the last 20 years)? And at any rate, do famous names like those quoted in his piece (and Peggy Atwood) ever have to sign such contracts?

In other words, structurally the position John “Fat Fuck” Barber holds is riven with contradiction and conflict of interest. Such a serious misreading of a straightforward Supreme Court copyright ruling makes Barber sound like an ideologue. I am talking about the kind of ideologue who:

• cannot accept facts about Canadian copyright law, like the fact that fair dealing exists;

• cannot accept that its side continues to lose at the Supreme Court (first in CCH, now in Alberta); and

• dresses up its belief that every duplication, of any size, should and must result in payment in a crocodile-tears concern for “professional writers” or “creators”

But of course, anyone who disagrees, even by insisting on strictly accurate statement of fact, must be a “copyleftist” or a “free culturist.” Since Barber ignored the correction I mailed him, I was not able to follow up to ask if the foregoing represents his beliefs, or if his resemblance to Degen-like ideologues is mere coïncidence. (I could have sent another message, but that too would have been ignored.)

The AIDS Memorial in Cawthra Square Park behind the 519 opened in 1993. On its concrete stelæ are affixed brass plaques listing the names of persons who died of AIDS in specific years.

Someone wrote a comment on an Xtra article complaining about the type size used for those names. “Would those involved with the Memorial… care to defend its use of teeny tiny unreadable typeface?” (Xtra doesn’t bother to print actual letters to the editor, preferring to copy and paste blog comments. The author of that comment was listed as Ken Kaukola in the print newspaper, a name that seems to have no public profile attached. Now it does.)

If ever there were a question with my name written all over it, this is it. I was walking by the 519 and, not having my pica rule handy, simply asked the desk if I could borrow their ruler. Typeface has consistently been Univers Condensed (typical for the city of Toronto). Cap height for names was 6 mm through 1989 and 3.5 mm from 1990 to present.

Cap height maps only irregularly to point size, a fact even lawyers can’t get a grip on sometimes, but here we don’t actually need to know the point size. Current type size is a shade bigger than half the old size. So yes, it’s smaller, but I dispute that it’s “teeny tiny.” (You can see that the type size changed by comparing it to the fixed dimensions of the bolts in the picture above.)

(The manager in charge of the Memorial didn’t respond to my mail.)

The Ian Hart/Martin Freeman/John Simm Axis of sympathetic British character actors (on Flickr).

1. Game, manly, lovable.

   

2. A son longing for his dad.

   

   Nobody has done this better.

3. Few remember Dirt.

   

(UPDATED) The journalist I had previously described as Canada’s only interesting fashion writer puts foot in mouth when asked to back up her claims.

Does Prickett really think her hit piece on Aaron Sorkin means she’s got it made? Was it a career-making move? Her stock surely rose with some editrixen and gays, yes, and they’ll be sure to hire her again under the auspices of the freelance contracts she signed. But how does she look now? Prickett wrote claims she can’t and won’t back up (and her editors let her), then effectively burned a source by publishing private E-mail. (To get ahead of an embarrassing story, I presume.) That suggests a lack of ethics and trustworthiness, something I expect will take her a long way. But she’ll never be as big as Sorkin; if a coke bust didn’t stop him, no “Internet girl” could.

Handbags at dawn.

Nobody told me that the now-notorious Sheila Heti review in the New Yorker (abstract) was faced with this stunning photograph of the authoress.

Icing on the cake is the photographer’s perfect name: Ethan Levitas.

Whether she likes it or not, I remain solidly prohetïst.

On Monday morning (2012.06.25), some guttersnipe spat on me and half-assedly threatened to kill me. Nothing was ever going to happen. It was one of those random things that happen in cities. But of course I called it in.

I dealt with an excellent 911 dispatcher. The problem was the attending police officer, A. Nuri (badge 8625). He listened to me in a rational, professional manner, then told me, in effect, if he had felt his life were threatened he would have run in the opposite direction. Should I call it in if I see this suspect again? I asked a couple of times. You could, he said, but as it stands there’s no basis to lay a charge. And certainly don’t call 911, he said. (A non-emergency dispatcher whom I talked to later unequivocally confirmed that initially calling 911 was correct. Dispatchers, I know from experience [and that dispatcher also confirmed], will just transfer your call if you phone the wrong number.)

In what I’ll describe here as a G20-style flourish, PC Nuri finished off our conversation by telling me I had been condescending from the beginning of the conversation. I gather it’s important for PC Nuri to show mastery over every situation, to second-guess the actions of a victim who emerged unscathed from what is legally an assault and death threat even if in practice it wasn’t much of either, and to offer vaguely menacing unsolicited commentary as to the victim’s tone.

The problem with telling a journalist he sounds condescending is that journalist tends to turn right around and report the facts for the permanent public record. And obviously I called Toronto Police for a comment. (A passive-aggressive drive-by posting on Twitter is less useful than saying nothing.) Tony Vella didn’t bother getting back to me as promised, but I tracked him down and was told his boss instructed him to say the following: “The best thing is if you have a complant against an officer, if you like, file a complaint against the officer. There are various ways to do that.”

There are two problems here. I actually wasn’t being condescending with PC Nuri. Trust me: If I had been, I’d have no trouble owning up to it. Then there’s the response-by-script that Vella’s superior forced him to issue. As I explained to Vella when we first talked on the phone, when a police officer calls a journalist condescending that journalist will report it. So in fact we have more avenues of redress at our disposal than simply filing a complaint. I reminded him of those parts of our previous chat and he just reiterated the script. I then told him that, at their next team meeting, the boss needed to be made aware that journalists are a special case.

So, PC Nuri, consider yourself Googlable. You have no one to blame but yourself and Tony Vella’s boss.

Compare and contrast:

• Australia’s defector to Canada’s bobsleigh team Chris Spring laments the travails of buying a house

• Would-be teammate Jean-Nicolas Carrière is so exhausted he can barely stay awake after full-time work as a waiter while also training to qualify for the team

On another day, we can compare Sam Giguère and Heath Spence, and talk about how BMW sponsors the Americans.